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There is a story that James Cagney stood on his toes while
acting, believing he would project more energy that way. That sounds like a
press release, but whatever he did, Cagney came across as one of the most
dynamic performers in movie history--a short man with ordinary looks whose
coiled tension made him the focus of every scene.

He's best known for the gangster roles he played in the 1930s, a
decade when he averaged almost four films a year for Warner Bros. From “Public
Enemy” (1931, with its famous grapefruit-in-the-face scene) to “The Roaring
Twenties” (1939), he was Hollywood's leading crime star--even at the studio
that also had Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart under contract. But he
didn't win his Oscar until 1942, when he played Broadway showman George M.
Cohan in “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

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Maybe
that was because Hollywood doesn't like to honor actors playing bad guys
(Cagney was nominated but didn't win in 1938, as a gangster in “Angels With
Dirty Faces”). Maybe it was because the nation was newly at war in 1942, and
happy to honor a patriotic biopic about the composer of “It's a Grand Old Flag.”
Or maybe it was because Cagney threw himself into the role with such complete
joy.

Audiences
didn't expect to see Cagney singing and dancing. He'd been a hoofer in his
stage days, but danced only once in a major film (“Footlight Parade,” 1933).
Now he had the lead in the life story of one of the most famous song and dance
men of his day--a role everybody knew Fred Astaire had turned down.

Cagney
wasn't a dancer by Astaire's standards, or a singer by anybody's, but he was
such a good actor he could fake it: “Cagney can't really dance or sing,”
observes the critic Edwin Jahiel, “but he acts so vigorously that it creates an
illusion, and for dance-steps he substitutes a patented brand of robust, jerky
walks, runs and other motions.”

You
can sense that in an impromptu scene near the end of the movie. Cagney's Cohan
is walking down a marble staircase at the White House when he suddenly starts
tapping and improvises all the way to the bottom. Cagney later said he dreamed
that up five minutes before the scene was shot: “I didn't consult with the
director or anything, I just did it.”

What's
he doing at the White House? The movie is told in one of the most implausible
flashbacks in the history of musical biographies--a genre famous for the
tortured ways it doubles back to tell showbiz stories. As the movie opens,
Cohan has been called out of retirement to star as Franklin D. Roosevelt in “I'd
Rather Be Right,” a Broadway musical hailing the president as war clouds
gathered. He gets a telegram summoning him to the White House, and arrives on
foot, drenched, late at night. He's shown into the Oval Office, where an
over-the-shoulder shot of FDR identifies him by his cigarette holder. The
president says he remembers seeing “The Four Cohans” in Boston 40 years
earlier.

That
sets off an entire film of flashbacks, narrated by Cohan, as he tells the
president his life story. How he was born on the Fourth of July (“I was 6
before I realized they weren't celebrating my birthday”). How he began as a
child star, touring with his parents, Jerry (Walter Huston) and Nellie
(Rosemary De Camp), and his sister, Josie (Jeanne Cagney, Cagney's own sister).
How he got a swelled head after starring in “Peck's Bad Boy,” and how while
still a teenager he played his own mother's father on the stage.

That
memory sets up a famous sequence, as a young fan named Mary (Joan Leslie) comes
backstage to get advice from the apparently bearded and ancient Cohan, who
continues the deception until suddenly breaking into a frenzied dance. She
shrieks as he takes off his makeup (in showbiz, he tells her, “you'll have to
get used to false eyebrows”) and soon he's writing a hit song for her (“Mary”)
and they're getting married.

These
are all of course staples of showbiz biography--reality turned into myth, if
not into press releases. Today's biopics focus on scandal and Freudian gloom,
but in “Yankee Doodle Dandy” everything is upbeat, and even George's marriage
proposal is couched in showbiz dialogue. No wonder that when the aging George
M. Cohan himself was shown the movie, he liked it. (According to historian Jay
Robert Nash, his response was right in character: “Cohan grinned, shook his
head, and paid the inimitable Cagney his highest compliment: `My God, what an
act to follow!' “)

It
was. As Pauline Kael said of Cagney, “Though he was born in 1899 and is
somewhat portly here, he is so cocky and sure a dancer that you feel yourself
grinning with pleasure at his movements. It's quite possible that he has more
electricity than Cohan himself had.” Unlike Astaire, whose entire body was
involved in every movement, Cagney was a dancer who seemed to call on body
parts in rotation. When he struts across the stage in the “Yankee Doodle Dandy”
number, his legs are rubber but his spine is steel, and his torso is slanted
forward so steeply we're reminded of Groucho Marx.

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There
are two currents to the story: patriotism and success. Cohan sees himself as a
flag-waver, and the critics attack him for writing only lightweight musical
comedies. Stung, he writes a serious play, but when it flops he apologizes and
returns to what his fans demand: sentiment, silliness and rousing nationalism.
(Ironically, two of his lyrics supplied the titles for anti-war films: “Born on
the Fourth of July” and “Johnny Got His Gun.”)

Every
scene follows the themes. He tries to enlist for World War I, is rejected for
being too old, and protests, “This war is a coffee klatsch compared to what I
go through in the course of a musical show.” He does a tap dance in the
recruiting office to demonstrate what he means, walks outside and catches two
notes from a marching band. And then, in one of those fantasies of creation so
beloved in films about musicians, he sits on an empty stage with a piano and
doodles with the notes until he discovers the opening for “Over There.”

The
movie hurries from one obligatory scene to the next: retirement of parents,
offscreen deaths of mother and sister, onscreen death of father (Walter Huston
goes out on a good exit line) and a montage of marquees from his hit shows.
Finally comes the White House visit and, after Cohan has told the patient FDR
his entire life story, a private presentation of the Medal of Honor.

There's
little that's really original in “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” which was directed by
Michael Curtiz, the gifted Warners workhorse whose credits included “Casablanca,”
also released in 1942. The cinematography, by the legendary James Wong Howe,
uses the elegant compositions of figures that were common at the time, and the
staging includes two numbers where big studio treadmills are used to move
groups of extras, or keep them marching in place.

But
the greatness of the film resides entirely in the Cagney performance. Even
Walter Huston, one of the finest character actors of the era, is confined by
routine material. There is a sudden chemistry in a sequence involving Fay
Templeton, as a Broadway star Cohan wants to work with (the relatively unknown
Irene Manning is stunning in the role). But mostly it's bio by the
numbers--except for Cagney's electricity.

He
doesn't dance so much as strut; he doesn't act so much as sell you his desire
to entertain. In dialogue scenes, when other actors are talking, his eyes dart
across their faces, silently urging them to pick up the energy; he's like
Michael Jordan impatiently willing his co-stars to keep up with him. And when
he's in full sail, as in “Give My Regards to Broadway” or “Yankee Doodle Dandy,”
it's like regarding a force of nature.

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